


it's no use, honey, cryin' over spilt nail polish

by philthestone



Category: Brooklyn Nine-Nine (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, also amy laughing in the background, gina Advises, pls note that I Know Nothing About Alcohol but apparently that's what the cool cops do, timestamped season one: jacob Pines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-23
Updated: 2016-01-23
Packaged: 2018-05-15 19:30:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,001
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5797027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/philthestone/pseuds/philthestone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Gina tells him to be honest about it all, but Jake’s pretty sure that even <em>Gina</em> wouldn’t have suggested dropping a truth bomb like that and then disappearing for the next five months undercover. </p><p>Actually, who knows, maybe she would. Jake can hear her voice in his head clearly, saying, “No, girl, you have got to make a <em>statement</em>. Corner her in the pouring rain! Declare your undying love right before you <em>die</em>. It’s an everything-proof <em>stratagem,</em> kiddo.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	it's no use, honey, cryin' over spilt nail polish

**Author's Note:**

> 1) disclaimer: i really am very ignorant about how drunkenness sounds, so if I screwed up, please forgive  
> 2) timestamp after Unsolvable but before Charges and Specs  
> 3) one of the lines is inspired by _i know who i want to take me home_ by 40millionyears on ao3; the line, “what would Taylor do?” was just too excellent to pass up  
>  4) i love jake and gina's friendship dearly and i really hope i got gina's voice right  
> 5) hopefully it's coherent idk what semblance of plot can even be found here yikes
> 
> reviews are hella good quality pedicures, peeps

He’s not drunk, he tells himself.

He’s not drunk. Pining drunkenly from a secluded corner table that has somehow become His Table is, quite frankly, discarding of any last notion of dignity he ever thought he possessed.

He tells Rosa this, two drinks back, when she falls into the chair in front of him in a way that somehow manages to be aggressive and graceful at the same time, slamming her own drink on the scratched wood in front of him and telling him to grow a pair.

Clearly, he’s been doing something wrong, because he hasn’t even opened his mouth and already, almost the whole squad seems to be aware of feelings that he himself only figured out maybe two weeks ago. That’s crazy, Jake thinks, _totally crazy_ , and also unfair, because it means Rosas sit at tables in front of him and tell him to grow pairs, which he _already possesses_ , thank you very much.

“Jake,” she opens, looking him in the eye and cutting right to the chase. “I’m not Charles, so I don’t give a crap.” A pause; she raises an eyebrow at her drink and then directs it towards him, and it’s slightly less intimidating than he anticipated. Then, pursing her lips: “You need another drink?”

He tells her no, because he isn’t trying to get drunk because that would be stripping himself of all dignity, and she reminds him that he never had any dignity to begin with, and Jake decides very early on that he prefers Terry’s methods of dealing with – _this_ – over anyone else’s.

(Which, in retrospect, _also_ involved getting him drunk, but that’s not the _point_.)

So. He’s not drunk, he’s tapping his fingers on the sides of his (maybe-sort-of-fifth, but, like, _not drunk_ ) drink. Which, Jake thinks, in an effort to retain some semblance of Chill and Manliness, is a nowhere-near-alcoholic-enough beer, in blatant disregard of Gina’s long-ago advice regarding the potency of mixed, flavoured cocktails and the general male population’s asininity.

And, of course, as if she senses his Bad Drink Choices from the other side of the bar, Gina is suddenly in front of him, telling him he needs to _talk_ about his _feelings_.

Well. He doesn’t actually tell Gina that he _has_ feelings. Who needs feelings? Feelings are, quite frankly, overrated, and maybe he should just quit life and become and emotionless robot instead. The drunkest part of his brain, in outright betrayal, decides that he’ll ask Captain Holt for pointers tomorrow even though he doesn’t have work tomorrow but he’ll go in anyway, to ask for assistance on this very vital and important matter. Of becoming a robot, that is, not telling Gina about his feelings, which he definitely _does not have at all_ – emotionless robot, remember – and which he is definitely _not_ going to do, even if she is, like, his little sister. Or big sister. Sometimes she gives off a big sister vibe, which is semi-unfair because he’s only six months younger than her.

But anyway, he’s sitting at his table pretending that he isn’t moping because Amy Santiago is laughing, that full-bright megawatt Santiago smile that always leaves him feeling punch-drunk. His butt is slowly carving a groove into the crappy plastic vinyl of the sticky chairs at Shaw’s, and he's trying not to feel too sorry for himself, a feat that's proving far more difficult and painstaking than originally anticipated. Amy’s laughing with her hand on Teddy’s thigh and he’s trying not to feel sorry for himself because that would make him a kind-of-jackass, wouldn't it? It’s not like he actually _said_ anything on time in the first place, because he’s an Absolute Moron, so this is all his fault. Which means he doesn’t have the right to mope, mostly, at all, but he still feels all around miserable anyway, holed away in the little corner table that’s turned into Jake’s Pining Table. 

Unofficially, because obviously he’s not going to _broadcast_ the fact that he’s _pining_ by _officially naming_ the table.

And Gina floats into the seat across from him.

“What’s with the frown, sad clown?”

“Meh,” says Jake into the table. Gina raises and eyebrow and follows the involuntary flick of his eyes to the spot where Amy Santiago is laughing with her very real and very perfect boyfriend.

Gina gives a sympathetic grimace; maybe because she’s known him since the age of six and maybe because she’s _Gina_ and even that involuntary eyeball flick Tells Her All, and she pats his hand.

“Drowning your sorrows never works, Jacob.”

“Shut up, Goose.”

Gina props her chin on her hands and looks at him for a long time, and then somehow manages to look back at Amy without actually turning around because she’s just _that_ good. She taps her sparkly gold nails on the table, reaches over in a business-like manner and places a bright pink cocktail in front of him, and makes a long “hmmmmm” noise.

“In regular circumstances,” she starts, with all the appropriate gravitas; Jake feels himself smile at her in spite of himself. “In _regular_ circumstances, I would present to you the words of wisdom that I live by in my day-to-day life, always.”

Jake raises his eyebrows invitingly.

Another hand pat, and pause for appropriate dramatic effect:

“What would Oprah do? _But_ –” she speaks over Jake’s mumbled protest “– _but_ , my sweet child, since your tastes are infinitely less refined, we’ll have to change that p’ticular sayin’.

“Gina,” starts Jake (and he’s _totally_ not slurring the words), “I know you’re tryin’ to –”

“Look,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You bein’ all mopey and sad over miss goody-two-shoes is kinking my aura.”

“M not being mopey,” Jake tells the table; a valiant attempt at indignation.

“Mmmhmm,” says Gina, patting his hand again. “Come on, girl. You got any plans?”

“Plans,” repeats Jake. The table is a wonderful conversationalist.

“What you’re going to do,” reiterates Gina. “About –” she makes a vague gesture that seems to capture within it his entire self and maybe half of the bar “– this.”

Jake considers this. “Get drunk,” he decides, “and finally embrace how pathetic I am?”

She _tsks_ and shakes her head. “Wrong plan, stan. You’re already drunk.” She pauses. “You’re in a bad place, clearly, so I’m not commenting on the pathetic thing.”

Jake lets his fingers slide down the slick side of his beer bottle, the pads of his fingers collecting the condensation as they go. Up at the bar, Amy laughs again; the sound is bright and colourful, less obnoxious than Gina’s drink but warm and happy and tipsy. If he wasn’t an Absolute Moron, Jake thinks, he’d be up there laughing with her – Teddy or no Teddy, because they’re _friends,_ and he loves being her friend.

Being Amy’s friend means that he can dig through evidence folders with her at nine in the morning trying to heat up old cases, means they try to sing East Coast rap together off-key on Thursday evenings when they’re on stakeout, that she gets all his dumb cop movie references and that she doesn’t have to poke and prod on days where his smiles are a little too wide and he has a hard time talking about feelings because everything in his head is a little too loud. It means he gets to sit with her and count the numbers out loud until she’s breathing okay again, and that he can listen to her come up with clever names for perps they put away, can secretly grin hugely every time she makes a particularly good arrest because she’s an amazing cop. It means that neither of them cares if the other is dead-fish tired and smelling like stale Chinese food because they’ve been working a case for three days nonstop with only maybe eight hours of sleep in between.

He loves being Amy’s friend, and Jake thinks that he wishes it was as easy as he wants it to be, to take a deep breath and ignore the weird funny ache in his chest and go sit up at the bar and tell Teddy about the time Amy got eggshell in her bra just so he can see her make her put out pouty frown. If he did that, he thinks, Teddy would probably laugh and Amy would eventually give him a begrudging smile (soft and small, but with her big dark eyes dancing) and lean into her boyfriend, and Jake would be happy for her because that’s what friends are supposed to do, and he really, really loves being Amy Santiago’s friend.

If he could do that, Jake thinks, feeling the water droplets slide down his fingers, he wouldn’t be sitting here, at His Table, pretending he’s not moping or pining after the object of his affections from afar. Which sounds stupid, Jake adds, to his own internal monologue – _stupid_ , because who came up with that expression, anyway, _object of affections_ , like the person is some sort of – of _lamp_.

That, Jake thinks, is objectification of lamps, and unacceptable, and he will never again refer to Amy Santiago – with her megawatt smile and multiple colour-coded binders and clumpy, sensible Santiago Boots and super glossy hair, and that little gasp of excitement she makes, when she cracks cases, the one that makes her nose scrunch up and her cheeks dimple and it’s _illegally_ adorable because it does dumb things to his chest area – as an objectified lamp. _That_ , Jake thinks, is even worst that getting drunk and embracing the lameness of his corner table, and if Amy ever heard she was being thought of as such, she’d probably start a campaign to stop lamp objectification.

He had a point, Jake thinks, blinking and realizing that he’s spent a whole minute spacing out and staring at the spot above Amy’s head where the light from the bar catches in her dark ha –

Gina’s shellaqued fingers are snapping in front of his nose.

“Jake. Jaaaaaake.”

“Hm,” says Jake. “Um, yeah. That.”

“Jake,” says Gina. “I can see how my general presence may bedazzle the common folk, but you’re usually immune.”

Jake looks at her for a moment, trying to formulate a response. The connection between his brain and ears and mouth is frustratingly slow and sluggish, which he’s sure has to do with the alcohol not at all. Gina’s blue-green eyes are almost uncharacteristically soft, her pink-painted mouth curling gently into something Jake too-slow mind identifies as sympathy. 

“I,” says Jake finally, “am putting my head down on the table.”

And he does.

Gina groans. Jake thinks he would have definitely expected in an alternate reality wherein his brain wasn’t taking a vacation, and he watches as she props her cheek on her hand with an undue amount of melodrama. Her eyes have rolled to the back of her head, almost, and her gingery hair swings down over one of her shoulders.

“Thanks for bein’ here for me, Gina,” Jake tells the freckle on the inside of his arm, slurring the words only a little bit.

“This is dumb,” says Gina.

“I know,” says Jake.

They sit in silence, the background clamour of the bar filtering in through Jake’s ears. His t-shirt is sticking to his back and his skin feels warm and flushed and tingly, and he can hear the steady _taptap_ of Gina’s nails on the waxed wood beside his head. Finally – after an indeterminable amount of time where Jake hears two more Amy Santiago Laughs on one incident of Charles exclaiming loudly over pureed eels from the other side of the room – Gina slams her hand down on the table. One of Jake’s unused napkins flutters down to the dirty floor.

“I have a three-part plan,” Gina informs him.

Jake looks up at her.

“First,” says Gina, “you need to ask yourself the most important question.” Another pause, also for appropriate dramatic effect. “ _What would your girl Taylor do_?”

Jake sighs. It’s a bit more melodramatic than he intends it to be, but he thinks he can finally blame the alcohol, and maybe also Gina’s all-pervading influence.

“’M not in th’ mood,” Jake tells her, hoping his expression has schooled itself into a frown, “for barin’ my soul and getting – getting my heart broken, over it. Gina."

Gina stares at him. 

"‘N I couldn’t even write a _song_ about it," Jake adds, "‘cause I’m crap at writing songs, you _know_ that.”

“Aaaah,” says Gina, grimacing. “Annette Kowalski, fifth grade.”

Jake nods miserably.

“Well,” Gina tells him, “you’re wrong on all accounts, but that’s not really a surprise.”

Her hands have curled into firsts under the sleeves of her white cable-knit sweater, and eyebrows have finally creased - not into one of her typical, carefully-schooled expressions, either, but soft and genuine. Jake thinks that maybe Gina’s realized that This Is Very Serious; he’s lowkey badmouthing T Swift, and that’s just _not_ a thing he does, ever. But it turns out that Gina realizing the gravity of the situation is not in his favour, because she reaches across and plucks his drink out of his hands, ignoring his protests.

Which can be summed up to a vaguely mumbled, “Hey!”, but Jake thinks he puts up a decent fight.

“Aight, says Gina, leaning back in her own crappy plastic vinyl chair. “Wrong on all accounts, Jacob, and I shall tell you why. First. I did not mean _writing_ the songs, though you _know_ we’d make a killer duet band, as the combination of my overall mesmerizing beauty and financial finesse with your half-decent voice is unbeatable.”

She taps her nails on the table and looks at him with her eyebrows raised.

“Fine,” says Jake. “If I’m ever nearly-evicted again, I’ll keep that ‘n mind.”

“Second,” continues Gina, tossing her hair over her cable-knit-covered shoulder. “Wrong again, as I’d kick any asses who’d break your lil cotton candy heart.”

“Thanks?” says Jake.

“I could take Santiago,” Gina confirms. “I can dodge manila folders _really_ well.’

“Please don’t,” says Jake.

“ _Third_ ,” says Gina. “You are gonna try asking yourself that question again, and then you’re gonna drink this cocktail, and then I’m gonna take you home.”

“’M gonna write songs about my feelings?” Jake says, eyes fixed on a sodden-looking cherry floating in the middle of his newly-pink drink. That was a lot of _gonnas_.

“Try again,” says Gina, fishing the cherry out with the straw and popping it in her mouth. “Back to the first bit.”

“Right,” Jake sighs. “I know. I gotta be honest ‘bout how I feel, ‘r whatever.”

“Bingo,” says Gina happily, sipping from his mostly-empty beer, which is still in her hand. She pulls a face. “You’re in a state of abject misery and therefore not thinking straight, so I’m letting this disgusting choice of beverage pass. Also, drink up buttercup, and then I’m getting you outta here.”

Jake tosses back the remainder of the cocktail in what he hopes is a semi-composed manner and blinks at her: once, twice.

“Thanks, Gina.”

“I am a treasure trove of nature,” Gina agrees. Across the bar, Amy’s laugh sounds again, and Gina’s hand finds his shoulder.

**

He falls asleep with his head on her shoulder in the cab ride home, and she lets him crash on her couch. She makes sure that there’s ample amounts of water and Advil and Danishes available the next morning even though she eats most of them, perched on the end of the couch and telling him all about how she found the old box of Marvel comics Nana used to keep in the laundry room stuck under the remains of some bookshelf in the back of the apartment. There's sunlight filtering through the blinds of Nana's old living room, and even though Gina's slightly-gaudy décor is covering many of the surfaces, Jake feels absurdly _at home_ , his shoulders curling into the worn upholstery of Gina's living room couch. 

Still: his head aches, and he tries to blame the hangover for the way his stomach seems to jump when Amy texts him sometime before noon, asking him if he got home okay last night and telling him about the teenage vandal Charles brought in who tried to tell them his name was Ima Weiner.

He tries not to smile, and in trying succeeds. He’s not sure if that’s what makes Gina sit him down on the couch with a box full of nail polish and tell him that they’re doing pedicures, but he appreciates the gesture nonetheless.

He remembers bits and pieces of their conversation the night before as he shakes the bottle of Plum polish. Gina doesn’t bring it up again, and Jake is too focused on getting the paint too cover her nails evenly to ask. He tries patterns on one of her big toes and it turns out kind of nice, purple and green and yellow, and Gina tells him about how Natasha’s baby is teething and almost chewed off her new dog’s tail.

Jake’s chest feels a little lighter, and maybe it’s only temporary, but – it’s something.

“Why,” says Gina, “did you ever become a cop. You’d make _so_ much money as a professional nail guy. Jake.”

“A better nail guy than a prostitute,” says Jake, nodding. “I’ll keep that in mind if I get evicted again.”

“Mmmhmm,” says Gina. “Okay, your turn. Teal blue or Glitter Surprise?”

Jake says coral and hates himself a little, but Gina keeps her usual Amy-directed comments about how coral is a boring colour to herself and hunches over accordingly. Really, Jake thinks, wiggling his toes afterwards and laying back listlessly on the couch in the sunlight-filled room, breathing in the lingering smell of nail polish remover and letting his eyes trace the familiar shadows on the plaster ceiling; they could _both_ be professional nail guys if there was ever another threat of eviction.

He’s not drunk anymore – for _real_ , this time – so he texts Amy back, _omg perp name hall o f faaaaaammmmmeeee,_ and tries not to hate himself too much.


End file.
